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tekgoblin writes "IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles. The standard is actually for Wireless Regional Area Networks (or WRAN), which use the white spaces left in the TV frequency spectrum."

It's pretty useless really. How many people can afford to buy a house that covers 12,000 sqr miles? What's the point in that? When will technology companies learn that enough is enough! It's just like the time Apple went and released the iPad. My iPhone squeezed in my trouser pockets just fine, but I had to get all my trousers upgraded to the 'apple approved trouser pocket size' when I got my iPad, and to add insult to injury, they only went and bloody removed the 'phone' part. This is just yet another unreasonable attempt at extracting more money from consumers, and I for one am disgusted! Right. I'd better go start saving for a larger house....

Think Agriculture or more specifically ranching. Rancher's spend a lot of their time monitoring their animals... if it can be done remotely that saves a lot of time, gas and keeps you playing WoW/Eve Online longer if you have real-time remote monitoring.

Actually what they're talking about is ONE base station covering a radius of 62 miles (pi r squared = 12,000 sq miles). The 22 MB/S is based on use of one 6 Mhz tv channel and that's a TOTAL for all user traffic and overhead on the channel. Some channel hopping is possible but it is doubtful that people would want antenna covering the whole tv spectrum (great big UHF/VHF antenna). Antennas made for a portion of the spectrum could provide better gain and in some cases much smaller size. Clients would have an outdoor directional antenna and GPS. Range would usually be best at the lowest frequencies (channel 2 is 54-60 MHz) But the antenna for that would be pretty large. The upper UHF frequencies can do pretty well if line of sight. Coverage at a distance would be spotty otherwise.

Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.

It's way too big for any farm I know of, but should suit your M.A.N. just fine, and probably save a ton of cash on line-of-sight lasers for college-campus building conglomerate connectivity, or even ground-tearing for fiber runs. For a cab company that wishes to switch from sp

Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.

That's some odd gear you've got if the signal propagates in a rectangle. I think the reference you were looking for is a 62 mile diameter circle. [wolframalpha.com]

From TFA: The technology uses a series of base stations within that radius, so it isn't actually one central router like everyone seems to think. In fact, I'm struggling to figure out what makes it so different, other than the frequencies used.

The formula for the area of a circle is pi * r^2 (really, Slashdot, you don't allow the ASCII ii symbol?) Solving for r gives us sqrt(12000/pi) which turns out to be about 61.8 miles [google.com]. As other posters have pointed out this is suspiciously close to 100 km, leading one to believe that it's an estimate and not necessarily accurate. It does mean that you might be able to deliver internet to space by the most common definition:)

Actually, it's quite impressive when compared to the current spec who's range is best measured in yards. 60 miles is a huge jump over the one to two hundred yards the current spec is limited to on the high end.

By my calculations, you could cover the entire continental US with just under 250 of those base stations. Obviously real life factors would increase that number quite a lot, but that still doesn't seem like that many towers. I'm guessing it's probably not practical to put very many people on a single tower, so such a system would have to be fairly exclusive (probably expensive).

The flip side is that you don't need to cover the entire country, and most of the areas you would need to cover have fairly low population density. This could be a real solution for rural areas that are going to be hard to service with cable or DSL. Urban and suburban areas already have wired access; and while more choices are always nice I can't see this being a match in capability, reliability and price.

This has potential to dramatically improve US internet access. In China, they have been able to completely ignore the pain that the US had in wiring the entire country with telephones because they can just stick up one tower and give an entire remote village cell phone service. This allowed China to get the entire country phone service in a matter of decade (not decades). It'd be great if the US could do something similar with broadband internet.

Well, first off, I'm assuming that you just took the US land area (in sq miles) and divided by 12,000. Unfortunately, the areas are circles, not squares, so you need overlap in order to cover all land area. (fitting circles edge to edge leaves ~22% of the area uncovered.) I have no idea how many extra stations you would really need, and no time/ immediate desire to calculate it, but it would probably be at least 30-40% more, at a quick guess. Not counting for terrain. (the problem of the most efficient way

"So, it'll never replace other systems, but it could be useful for government work (search and rescue, park rangers, and of course the military) or people who live way, way outside civilization and can't get satellite systems."

Your calculations are incorrect. If we take the land area for just the continental U.S., you'd need a minimum of 260 towers to cover the same area. And you'd need 317 if you wanted to include the land area of Alaska and Hawaii as well. Mind you, those numbers fail to take into account the fact that most of the coverage would be lost to overlap between towers, which would mean you'd actually need significantly more towers. Those numbers also assume that you're able to utilize the full 12,000 sq. miles claim,

No licensing fees for using the spectrum, I assume. Although, looking it up Wikipedia, I'm not sure. Apparently the devices are supposed to contact a central (FCC) server to inquire which channels are not reserved for TV. Not sure whether the FCC is charging anything or whether personal operation is free.

So, simple maths suggest that we're definitely not going to have reception if we're more than 62 miles away from the tower, and that doesn't take into account the curvature of the earth, the height of the tower, atmospheric distortions, etc.

but it does suggest the standard would allow for decent reception within a 30 mile radius. That ain't too bad.

It's easy to make an omni directional antenna. You lose potential gain and you might not want it omnidirectional given specifics of terrain, etc. Your other points are vaild, the real world is not populated by spherical cows, spherical houses or spherical people (unless you live in the US where this is a fairly good approximation).

If it can indeed cover an area that large, how many users could a single AP support?

So, simple maths suggest that we're definitely not going to have reception if we're more than 62 miles away from the tower, and that doesn't take into account the curvature of the earth, the height of the tower, atmospheric distortions, etc.
but it does suggest the standard would allow for decent reception within a 30 mile radius. That ain't too bad.

If you take into account that the height needed to get a 62 mile line of sight, I bet your going to find that the tower will need to be about 1200' above average terrain. That is my SWAG. I don't feel like calculating it.

Yeah. Slashdot article submitters sometimes put the most useless things in their summaries. Range is much more useful to me than area, because what I really want to know is how *far away* one node can be from another.

I suppose if you are someone thinking about building a WiFi access network/ISP (along the lines of a cellular network), then area might give you a good idea of just how many customers you can squeeze into the range of a tower.

I would imagine that they use case for this is similar to LTE / Mobile WiMAX - you have a fixed high power transmitter with a huge antenna, and then a load of smaller units with much less powerful transmitters. You won't get point-to-point transfer between mobile devices at that range, but something the size of a phone can transmit to the big antenna on the hill. The aim of this stuff is to make it relatively easy to deploy rural broadband - if you get one connection at a decent speed, then you can use th

If you read the article, you'll see that customers are expected to install a box in their house. I'd imagine their standard 802.11a/b/g/n router would then plug into that, rather than into a cable modem or something of that sort. 802.22 is not the sort of thing that you'll see in next generation laptops for use anywhere.

This will be GREAT for the wireless mesh people who want to get away from the mess of the internet and communicate without fear of the big bad media companies spying on their every move.Of course, yes, we all know the bad side of archaic, no-censorship networks (child porn, terrorism, etc.), but you just have to deal with that.The creators of the products to mesh technologies probably should work together with encryption and sandboxing companies to create an ecnrypted sandbox so that people don't have their lives destroyed because of a thumbnail that someone ELSE uploaded, or at least advise people on products they can use.

No doubt the governments will try suppress such things by making it illegal to run a WRAN without a licence or some shit.

This news is most welcome! It has the potential to level the ISP playing field again and harkin back to the times when mom and pop ISPs existed. How? Small start-up ISPs can now offer competing broadband to the likes of AT&T and offer the service at an unlimited tier. Thus, AT&T will be forced to remove its service caps. Companies will be able to build their own MAN's without having to pay Verizon/AT&T/CenturyLink leases for the lines. I will be following this with some excitement especially because I would love to run my own small ISP.

At a mighty 19Mbps for the whole thing you can forget about having any real number of customers. My home Internet connection is better than that, and it is not on a shared media like radiowaves.

Good for you, but it would be handy for getting a decent connection to areas which would otherwise be restricted to dial-up or satellite connections. I have a 20/2Mbps line at home (could've had 200Mbps if I wanted to). It's more than adequate for regular use, and sure as hell beats dial-up.

Correct. It's not competition for the incumbents, it's a good way to service those who the incumbents don't find worthy. Some of the public documents indicate an intended per-user bandwidth of 1.5m down and somewhere around 384k up, so it's comparable to long-range DSL, 3G cellular, or home satellite in that way.

I used to live in the middle of nowhere about 32,000 feet from the CO according to Verizon. I officially had 3/768 speeds on my DSL, but it never once synced faster than 864/512 and was usually u

Oh the solution to your crazy capitalist idea is obvious: the monopolies will simply buy the licenses for various regions, thereby preserving the caps and not improving their networks, all the while boasting of more and more services with higher prices, but in actuality continue to deliver less and less.

VHF? or UHF? a new way to connect to your local Internet Service Provider wirelessly sure sounds like a good idea and will give DSL & CableTV/Internet broadband some needed competition keeping the price down a little (i hope)

Republicans in Congress are proposing to eliminate unlicensed use of the new white space spectrum. That is, they'll require that the spectrum be sold to a entity willing to pay a market-competitive price - meaning the spectrum will have to produce a profit for one entity rather than producing value for everyone.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have this huge thing called Sutro tower the Official Page [sutrotower.com] of the tower is the corporate site and this
Public [sutrotower.org] page will give you a huge amount of information on the tower and its history.

This thing is almost 1000 feet tall and sits on the top of a Mt. Sutro and is direct line of site for most of the SF Bay Area and it packs a huge amount of RF power. The problem is that when you get behind a low lying hill the VHF TV band

Can we get some help from the EFF so that we don't get sued by the big telcos?

I'll ask for help from my math-betters "how many of these routers does it take to cover 90% of the country with 90% coverage" (aka keep the averages down by skipping the giant national parks out west etc.)

Can we get someone like on a T3 (or whatever) to host a rack of these and tell those phone companies to take their data caps and shove it?

Stop drooling over your 'stick it to the telco' thoughts, and actually think for a moment. The stated bandwidth of this is 22Mbps per WRAN (not per user, per WRAN). The population of New York State (averaged) is 411 people/sq mi. So in the 12000sq mi area a tower covers you have almost 5 million people (on average). So each person can have a whopping 4 BITS per second of bandwidth. Even if you covered on 1 sq mi per tower (a huge expense) your would still be sharing 22Mbps with 410 other people. Of course, the actual density in NYC is more like 30000 people/sq mi.

The only place this makes sense is where the population has very low density, which are places that currently have no coverage at all. Just like TFA says.

Except I don't see how it's going to be as cheap, fast, or scalable as cable or telco FTTN/ADSL2 is already. Sounds like it could be nice for rural areas, but it you already have upgraded cable/DSL services run to your neighborhood there isn't much it can offer...

Americans can't really get their heads out of their own asses, can they?
There is a continent called Africa, where wireless communications are the only viable option for communications. The industrialised world has had the copper lines laid in the second half of 20th century, not so in Africa and much of the rest of the landmass. Where even 56kbps is a huge deal...

It shares a few ~20Mbps channels over 12,000 square miles. New York City has over 8 million residents in about 300 mi^2, and the entire New York state is only 47,000 mi^2.

Most cable or FTTN DSL shares higher bandwidth over a neighborhood with 1000 homes, intsead of (potentially) millions. In rural Wyoming, it might be a good alternative to wired access, but I'm pretty skeptical about a dense urban - or even suburban - area. Actually, if you look up any white paper of 802.22, they specifically point out

My parents had a microwave Internet connection for about 5 years. The base tower was just over 7 miles away and they needed to put it on a 50 foot(15m) pole to get LOS. With guy wires and all, the connection was still particularly unstable. I don't know if they had a signal power booster in line or not. I could just imagine that it would take quite a bit more power to get that signal to go 50 miles vs the 7-8 they were doing.

VHF and low band UHF blast through ground clutter a whole lot better than microwavesIn all likelihood a similar link at a similar distance wouldn't need a 50 foot pole.

The only place where I'd see antenna size being a problem is the old VHF-LOW (54-87MHZ). 200-700MHZ or there abouts, which encompases, the old VHF-HI and UHF TV bands (well most of them anyway) represent a great mix of transmission properties, good penetration, with antennas that aren't too big..

What kind of output will your home antenna need to reach back to a tower that's 50 miles away?

Four watts, according to this IEEE presentation [ieee802.org] (PDF). Page seven shows that the intended use is with a range of 10-30km, four watts from both ends (though other documents indicate that outside of the US the base stations may be allowed up to 100 watts). The 100km range quoted in this article is listed as "exceptionally, under favorable conditions". The customer end would also be using a directional antenna mounted at minimum 10 meters above the ground, so basically this is comparable with legal home CB

100 W Amateur radio transmitters go for several hundred to several thousand dollars. You could shave some price off by increasing the sales volume but a 100W VHF transmitter is not a trivial piece of electronics.

Cheap enough, however for many individuals to afford one and even more small groups of people like a neighborhood. Could, in fact, spawn a whole new industry of essentially microISPs.

If I have a $500 phone in my pocket, a $1000 extension to my $4k worth of home networking and computing equipment is not a major outlay. And how much money has Apple put in the bank selling $500 phones?

There's no cause to underestimate the market for this based on what its likely cost is. Its likely price, however, given its utility, could be several thousand dollars if we leave it to the usual suspects to develop and market it.

I'm reminded of a story (can't speak for its accuracy though) of this small town that recently had a cell tower put up in its boundaries. Immediately, people in the town started complaining of headaches and insomnia. They complained to the company and they took some of the townspeople on a tour of the new radio tower to explain things and allay their concerns: the tower didn't even have any equipment yet.

... and if you're close to the television transmitter you'll catch on fire.

If such a transmitter was located on you house, unless you had an antenna that ensured the radiation was not directed inward the building would be quite uninhabitable. Now, there's no way such a power level would be required for this, but something around 10s of watts would be quite possible. That will still expose you to a great many orders of magnitude higher RF power levels than you are presently receiving (depending on the ante

Guys, don't get your hopes up for an ISP-bucking peer to peer revolution in network topology. We're still gonna have a top down hierarchy and centralized control.

The IEEE, together with the FCC, is pursuing a centralized approach for available spectrum discovery. Specifically each Base Station (BS) would be armed with a GPS receiver which would allow its position to be reported. This information would be sent back to centralized servers (in the USA these would be managed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)), which would respond with the information about available free TV channels and guard bands in the area of the BS.